'Vacationland': John Hodgman suffers on the beach

Viking

"Vacationland" by John Hodgman

"Vacationland" by John Hodgman (Viking)

Meredith MaranChicago Tribune

What, one might reasonably ask, are “painful beaches”? And why are they in the subtitle of the new memoir by John Hodgman, the actor/comedian/author who brought us some of the funniest bits on “The Daily Show”?

The beaches, it turns out, are in Maine, where rocks stand in for sand, and where Hodgman’s family is in the process of moving. The “pain” the beautiful beaches inflict on Hodgman stands in for the suffering that his beautiful life inflicts on him. He loves and hates Maine and he loves and hates his life, and this is the subject of “Vacationland”: the self-conscious ambivalence with which John Hodgman regards the privilege and the pain of being a wildly successful, wildly smart, wildly self-involved white American man who’s approaching the age of 40 in the year 2017.

“The ocean in Maine is traumatically cold,” Hodgman writes. “If you make the mistake of going into it, every cell in your body will begin shouting the first half of the word ‘hypothermia’ into your brain; the second half will simply be frozen tears. And the beaches of Maine offer no relief as you launch yourself back onto shore, because the beaches of Maine are made out of jagged stones shaped like knives.”

And later: “(Maine) is a beautiful place that I paradoxically want to hoard to myself and share with everyone I meet.”

Considering the content of Hodgman’s first three books, a series of fake-fact almanacs (“The Areas of My Expertise,” 2006; “More Information Than You Require,” 2009; “That is All,” 2012), one might also reasonably question whether Hodgman’s stories are accurately labeled “true.” The answer, I would wager, is yes. On these pages, Hodgman is as funny and as self-deprecating as ever, but also, deeply and hilariously, for real. Although he is a very fortunate man, the dotted line he draws between growing older and growing up will be familiar to any gloomily aging person — which is to say, anyone older than 17.

“Let’s say you move to Park Slope, Brooklyn, in your late thirties because you suddenly, impossibly, have money coming in from television,” Hodgman writes. “You have grown up. But it turns out all of Brooklyn is suddenly alive with a not-growing-up renaissance …. You are surrounded by people younger than you whose sense of style is to look like you.”

Lengthily apologizing for his “thin, patchy, and asymmetrical” beard, Hodgman describes his facial hair as “an evolutionary signal” that says, “ ‘I’m all done.’ A moustache sends a visual message to the mating population of Earth that says, ‘No thank you. I have procreated. My DNA is out in the world, and so I no longer deserve physical affection.’ ”

“Vacationland” is an ambitious departure from Hodgman’s previous authorial endeavors. It’s funny, but it’s no joke. The book is a cleverly composed meditation on one privileged American’s life — and, glancingly, on America — at a crucial moment for both. Although most of his observations are of himself, Hodgman occasionally places his protagonist in the world, looking out as well as in.

In one passage, Hodgman sees an “older, affluent black couple” sitting on a porch in summertime Maine “silently watching the parade of well-heeled Caucasians walk by. They were sharing a vanilla ice-cream cone. I could not guess what they were thinking about …. I thought, shamefully for the first time, about what it would be like to be a non-white person visiting Maine .… to see so little of yourself …. I should have known it all along.”

In the book’s introduction, Hodgman apologizes in advance. “This is a book about me and my beard wandering through three wildernesses,” he writes, “the green mountains of rural western Massachusetts where I disposed on my youth, the mercilessly painful beaches of coastal Maine where I will eventually accept my death, and the haunted forest of middle age that lies between them …. (Here is) all the awful truth about my dumb thoughts and feelings. I am sorry for this. It is all I have left.”

Reading passages like this, one can’t help but wince at Hodgman’s self-involvement. And yet, one can’t help but give him props for being so unabashedly, so ironically, and so entertainingly who he is.